What is Application Insight in Visual Studio

Question

I can see number in thousand as Application Insights in Visual Studio 2017. I read about the Application Insights but does not exactly understood what is use of it.

As shown in below screenshot, its showing 25K in Application Insights and continuously increasing. Messaging_TestApp is SQL Database name used for NService bus.

Can anyone explain what is Application Insights and why number increasing ?

Answer 1

First, let me answer the basic "What is App Insights?":

Application insights is essentially an activity monitoring tool from Microsoft for any type of application.

From Microsoft's documentation on What is Application Insights?

Application Insights is an extensible Application Performance Management (APM) service for web developers on multiple platforms. Use it to monitor your live web application. It will automatically detect performance anomalies. It includes powerful analytics tools to help you diagnose issues and to understand what users actually do with your app. It's designed to help you continuously improve performance and usability. It works for apps on a wide variety of platforms including .NET, Node.js and J2EE, hosted on-premises or in the cloud. It integrates with your DevOps process, and has connection points to a variety of development tools. It can monitor and analyze telemetry from mobile apps by integrating with Visual Studio App Center.

Now, the more specific parts of your question:

What you are seeing in Visual Studio?

Application insights is normally run on a server sitting somewhere or purchased as a service from Azure, but it was recently also built into Visual Studio for monitoring apps running out of the IDE. The VS IDE is essentially running a sort of minified version of Application Insights that has then hooked into the SQL Database project you are currently debugging.

What is the Banner number?

From my own testing this number appears to be the total number of telemetry logs Application Insights has recorded since I started the application. Perhaps most of them are being filtered out by your 30m time range.